[10] Blaise Agüera y Arcas was born in Providence, Rhode Island to a Spanish father and an American mother.

[2][1] As a teenager, Agüera y Arcas interned with the U.S. Navy research center in Bethesda, Maryland, where he reprogrammed the guidance software for aircraft carriers to improve their stability at sea, which helped to reduce seasickness among sailors.

[2] In 2001, using computational techniques, Agüera y Arcas and Princeton University’s Scheide Librarian Paul Needham published their findings that the punchcutting method for mass-producing movable type attributed to Johannes Gutenberg was likely invented decades after Gutenberg’s Bible, and by a different inventor.

[15] In 2004, he devised a computational method for the Library of Congress to create color composite images of almost two thousand negatives by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.

[17] The technology was used to develop Silverlight, Pivot, Photosynth and the standalone cross-platform Seadragon application for iPhone and iPad.

[30] In 2021, Agüera y Arcas published an opinion on his experience with the latest generation large language models in the form of AI chatbot LaMDA stating that "no objective answer is possible to the question of when an 'it' becomes a 'who'.